Editor’s Note: The following post comes to us from Jürgen Huber, Professor of Finance at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, and Michael Kirchler, Associate Professor of Finance at the University of Innsbruck, Austria and visiting professor at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.

A hard-fought campaign is over and President Obama has been reelected. Should shareholders take notice? In brief, yes. In the paper, Corporate campaign contributions and abnormal stock returns after presidential elections, forthcoming in Public Choice, we explore the stock market performance of top corporate contributors after the elections that brought Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, respectively, to power. In both cases, the top contributors strongly outperformed the market.

We focus on campaign contributions by corporations before a presidential election and their stock market performance afterwards. From a rent-seeking perspective, companies can have an incentive to spend money for presidential candidates. And, as presidential hopefuls need to raise large sums, campaign contributions by companies and business associations are usually a welcome source of funds. After the 2010 Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United against FEC, which grants companies the same free speech rights (and thus spending in the political process) as those accorded to individuals, corporate campaign contributions are likely to become even more important in the future.